VIDRA - Vital Infrastructure Detection & Risk Assessment

💎 Idea

Problem: Utilities lose millions of cubic meters of treated water to leaks and pipe bursts. Traditional acoustic detection is too slow and expensive to deploy network-wide, while changing climates threaten raw water reservoirs.

Solution: VIDRA is a space-powered, "source-to-tap" command center that shifts water management from reactive to proactive. Features include:

• Leak Pre-Localiser: Narrows the physical search area for acoustic teams by 100x using satellite data.

• Material-Specific ML: Predicts pipe failure risk in real-time (handling Cast Iron vs. HDPE physics differently).

• Reservoir Tracking: Automated volume forecasting to track days-of-supply.

• Automated ILI Compliance: Instantly generates Infrastructure Leakage Index reports.

🛰️ EU space technologies

VIDRA deeply integrates Copernicus data for European-scale monitoring at a fraction of commercial costs:

• Sentinel-1 (SAR): Analyzes C-Band backscatter anomalies over time to detect underground capillary moisture from pressurized buried leaks.

• EGMS: Extracts differential ground settlement and angular distortion to predict structural pipe stress before a burst occurs.

• Sentinel-2 (Optical): Fuses NDWI indices with SAR data to mask out surface rain/vegetation, virtually eliminating false-positive leak alerts.

• CDSE Statistical API: Hyper-optimized pipelines (processing ~0.06 PU per query) allowing us to monitor thousands of EU reservoirs entirely on the free tier.

🌍 EU Space for Water

Challenge addressed: Securing equitable and efficient access to water.

VIDRA drastically reduces Non-Revenue Water (NRW). By providing utilities with GPS coordinates of hidden subsurface leaks and predicting imminent pipe bursts, maintenance is prioritized and catastrophic loss is prevented. Furthermore, our CDSE reservoir tracking allows municipalities to proactively manage drought scenarios and secure long-term water supply.

👨‍👩‍👦 Team

• Emilian Yanev (Lead Architect & Space Data): Drives the technical engine. Bridges complex Copernicus SAR/Optical pipelines and Hugging Face ML with a high-performance React/FastAPI stack.

• Zhan Georgiev (Product Strategy & Comms): Translates deep tech into business value. Shapes the pitch and go-to-market strategy to align with utility pain points and EU regulations.

• Victor Koycheff (Operations & Domain Integration): The cross-functional engine. Bridges raw space data with practical utility operations, handling domain research and system testing.